Josh Mankiewicz

And that's kind of what made the cops think,

there's a crime in progress here.

And what they didn't know at first was whether this was some kind of crime involving cliff who might either was being held against his will, or maybe he was dead or whether cliff was somehow complicit in this, because that was some of their thinking in the early days, like he's disappeared and he's going to say, I'm out of town and he's going to say, everything's been stolen.

And then it's some kind of insurance scam.

But eventually they figured out that the problem was something has happened to Cliff.

And it was a long time before they figured out what.

Yeah, I mean, look, he's the kind of guy that you want to have if you're doing a grift.

I mean, he can play a role.

He sounds like he's from another country.

He's got this very posh, erudite, you know, I went to the best schools accent.

He's also sort of an indeterminate ethnicity, which means he can be a British lawyer.

He can be the Nepalese prince.

It's not exactly clear what Cashel's backstory is.

And part of the problem here is that you can't really trust anything coming from anybody's lips here.

But he certainly presented himself as this prince and did that very, very effectively.

And if you're doing a con, you need somebody who can be a good actor.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, these guys were very sharp about some things, and they were incredibly stupid about other things.

Like, it didn't occur to them, if I pull a U-Haul truck up to this guy's house that we've just murdered, people are going to see it.

They might call police.